ABSTRACT
This chapter reports findings from a research collaboration examining the use of a video platform (VoiceThread) to enhance more traditional written fieldnotes for teacher candidates (TCs) making sense of their varied, entangled experiences in school sites. We argue that asking TCs to vlog (video blog) about their teaching experiences and to engage with peers’ posts provides opportunities develop into, not merely reflective practitioners, but diffractive practitioners. Multimodal and diffractive analysis revealed that the social nature of digital spaces produced a range of TC sense-making through reported speech, emotion, humor, photographic documentation, manipulation of slides through drawing features, reenactments of classroom scenes, and the range of comments that peers left on each other’s posts. Through vlogging as a form of multimodal fieldnotes, TCs can be encouraged to identify the complex diffractions that they experience in school settings and bear witness to others’ very different reactions to the same retelling. This process can equip future teachers to engage in (re)interpretation of classroom spaces as a complicated social practice.
